And that platform recently got even snazzier when Dapper linked into the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. This online marketplace connects ad sellers and buyers, who can optimize bids for each impression in real-time, if they have the right technology.

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“Real-time bidding is not like anything tech companies have dealt with in the past,” says Eran Shir, CTO and co-founder of Dapper. “It requires, first and foremost, the ability to respond within a very limited time frame of 50 milliseconds or less.”

www.dapper.net Headquartered in San Francisco 30 employees and growing Founded in 2006, Dapper’s vision is to change the way that people experience the web, surfacing the right content for the right person at the right time

That’s roughly the interval between when a user clicks and a webpage is served up, complete with any display ads bought on-the-fly. If an ad-buying system takes any longer to calculate its bid, that opportunity is gone. “Contextual, behavioral, semantic and other business data must all be called within those scant 50 milliseconds, while running complex logic to decide the right bid for that impression,” notes Eran. “The more logic you plug into those 50 milliseconds, the more value you can generate for your clients.” Righ Rightt se sett o off ttools ools,, gr grea eatt ssuppor upportt “The guy looking for a four-star hotel for two weeks in Rome is much more profitable than the guy looking for a bargain for a weekend in Vegas. For one you should bid $5, for the other you should bid 30 cents,” says Eran. “But if you don’t look deeply into the intent, you just bid on the average. You say, ‘Okay, everyone interested in traveling is worth this amount.’ But you’re either paying too much or too little. Real-time bidding allows you to really answer the question of how valuable any user is to you.” To enable this sophisticated instant bidding, Dapper needed to stitch its platform to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange through the Real-Time Bidder API. But a slicksounding programming job can easily turn into a fashion disaster. Not so with DoubleClick’s Real-Time Bidder. “Google’s DoubleClick team did a great job supporting the integration. They made us feel like we had a round-the-clock team at our disposal rooting for our success,” says Eran. He mentions the clear process, good tools, thorough documentation, and the high level of attentiveness from the people on DoubleClick’s side. “Once we actually began the integration process, it was two weeks of quick backand-forth, and then we were up and running.” In just a few weeks, the project was all sewn up, and the integrated platform was available for Dapper’s clients, such as Expedia and Kayak.com.

How is this powerful combo of DoubleClick Ad Exchange plus Dapper’s platform looking today? “Obviously, Google’s infrastructures are very robust. But real-time bidding is most useful when you can leverage unique data or algorithms that the exchange itself cannot,” says Eran. For example, Dapper has a massive database on 200 million web users. The company also developed stats on the likelihood to convert by various product categories, and discovered an order-of-magnitude difference between categories. And its systems can go even deeper, drilling down into conversion patterns for every individual SKU offered by an advertiser, and adjusting bids accordingly. Such deep insights help deliver flashy results.

Dapper’s statistics show a vast difference in consumer likelihood to convert depending on product category, and even SKU. The red line shows the average across all categories. Part of Dapper’s formula for success is in showing the specific product or offer a consumer is interested in the ad unit itself. For a large hotel chain, Dapper’s system analyzed the semantics of various travel sites on-the-fly to find the right hotel room at the right price for each impression. The client got 253% better results than with its best static ad. For a major e-commerce site, Dapper dynamically re-displayed ads for products that consumers had previously viewed but not purchased. This produced eight times more sales than showing standard ads for best-selling products. Adding the dimension of real-time bidding allows Dapper to go far beyond simply retargeting users, but allows marketers to actually pay the right price for every user instead of buying on the average. “We do a couple great things with DoubleClick’s real-time bidding. We’ve built a major advancement in bidding based on a dozen or so different dimensions—time, context, content, products—representing millions of granular bidding decisions that our system handles in real time,” says Eran. “From a business perspective, it’s about the sheer scale, the liquidity and the transparency of every impression on the Ad Exchange. DoubleClick makes all this possible, giving us extra reach and scale at profitability that would not be possible without real-time bidding.”

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